Cold Sesame Soba Noodle Salad with Cabbage Slaw

When I first became gluten-free, I thought soba noodle salad would be my savior. That was almost 4 years ago, believe it or not. And let me tell you, I had a rude awakening the first time I tried to cook with 100 percent buckwheat noodles.

First of all, they were very difficult to find. Eden Organic seemed to be the only name in town and since the packages all looked identical, it took more than one trip to the grocery store to buy the correct kind that didn’t contain any wheat flour.

Once I finally got to cooking them, I quickly discovered why 100 percent buckwheat noodles aren’t really a thing. All it took was a couple aggressive bubbles in my simmering pot of water to cause the strands to break apart into 1-inch pieces…which then also somehow managed to get completely stuck together.

When I was brainstorming eat yourself pretty recipes for this month of the wellness project, I remembered a great recipe for Almond Butter Noodles from my friend Alexis Wolfer’s book The Recipe for Radiance, which is an amazing resource for ways to eat and apply your way to better skin. I decided to riff on her soba noodle salad and combine it with another idea for a sesame cabbage slaw.

The soba noodles themselves are made from a mixture of buckwheat flour, which contains lots of good fatty acids to help keep the skin soft and subtle, and vitamin A-packed sweet potato. Though the red peppers are great for vitamin C, the real skin star in this recipe is the cabbage.

Remember the cabbage soup diet? As cray cray as the idea of eating nothing but a sulfury soup sounds, it became a fad because of this veggie’s incredible detoxifying powers. Cabbage contains an antioxidant that helps the liver naturally flush out the toxins it works so hard to sort everyday. And as we briefly discussed last month, a healthy liver is the key to healthy skin. If things aren’t being evacuated properly, all that junk just takes the first available exit ramp to your face.

If you’re looking for a healthy brown bag option, this sesame soba noodle salad is perfect to make on Sunday and eat for lunch all week long. Since my detox, I’ve been trying to make my weekdays as healthy as possible so that there’s room for all the more hedonism by Friday at 5pm, and veggie main courses like this have been helping me get there.

Ok, I feel kinda stupid, I never did my homework and I always just assumed that soba noodles were not gluten free or that they probably didn’t make ones that were! I feel like I’ve been missing out on all these amazing soba noodle recipes! I must go hunt some down asap! This cold sesame soba noodle salad looks so good!!

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THERE

I’m Phoebe: gluten-free chef, culinary instructor, Hashimoto’s advocate, & author. I’m obsessed with the sweet spot where health and hedonism intersect, in the kitchen and beyond. And I want to help you find it too. READ MORE ABOUT PHOEBE